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A Day at the Beach: Recollections - Softcover

Wolff, Geoffrey

 
9780804170093: A Day at the Beach: Recollections
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804170096 ISBN 13: 9780804170093
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

"A memoir of uncommon grace and self-deprecating charm" (Newsday) that recounts the moral (and sometimes immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father—from the acclaimed author of The Duke of Deception.

In this essay collection, Geoffrey Wolff shows us his wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases—presided over by his con-man father—then shifts to his brash, short-lived teaching career in Istanbul. With dazzling literary agility, Wolff guides us through the surprising, invaluable turns that shaped his path: his victory over the chaos of drink, his open-heart surgery, his life-affirming surrender to the slopes of the Matterhorn, and his transcendent love of family. Long considered a classic, now expanded and back in print after two decades, A Day at the Beach shares Wolff's spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GEOFFREY WOLFF is the author of six novels and six works of nonfiction, including the memoir The Duke of Deception, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1994 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. From 1995 to 2006, he directed the Graduate Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. For his writing, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Bath, Maine.

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chapter 1

Apprentice

There arrived in my mailbox a billet-­doux from my little brother Toby. More specifically, this was a five-­page letter to him, from me, with his Post-­it self-­stick memo stuck to page 1. The letter was dated 13/xi/63—­à la European mode—­and postmarked Cambridge, England, mailed decades before to an eleventh-­grader. Single-­spaced elite, without margins, it was typed with such manifest urgency that words fly truncated off the right edge of the tissue-­thin foolscap; the keys must have been righteously rapped—­“o”s are little holes.

The tone of this document owes much to austere dogma, a religion of literary Art. It answers a letter in which Toby seems obscurely to have offended me by an expression of enthusiasm for his country and for some of its better contemporary and popular prose writers. Now Toby is himself one of our better contemporary prose writers, but at that time he was too young to vote, and I wasn’t, so I took it upon myself to tell the stripling a thing or two.

“We live in an age when contraception and the Bomb and rejected opportunities usurp each other [sic] as ­negative functions . . . the cliché governs by executive function . . . in the ruined warrens are pockets of beautiful life . . .” The bulk of my letter consists of a suggestion that before Toby read another word of William Styron or Norman Mailer (for whom he had confessed such provocative admiration) he turn at once to Donne, Eliot on Donne, Sophocles, Aristotle, John Jones on Aristotle, Racine, Hegel (on tragedy) and I don’t know who all else. In short: “Begin at the beginning and familiarize yourself with literature.” To this end he was to write weekly essays for me, and I would lead him across the ages, “working through language and time until you learn how to read, and may discover whether you wish to write.”

Jeepers! Or, as Toby noted on the yellow Post-­it: “I still don’t know half the stuff in here, and I’m a Full Professor, Mr. Smarty Pants!! (I thought you might want this back.)” Let’s say Toby has me by the shorts on this one: it’s in his archive still—­he sent a photocopy, damn him.

For a letter so passionately typed, mine has an oddly distanced air, save for its ad hominem, ad extremum and ad absurdum assertion that “every backward glance at our family tree reveals a body hanging from the withered limbs.” I think I understand the abstracted character of these declarations: whatever the provenance of my athletically typed (and no doubt plagiarized) maxims, all I can now say with confidence is these were thoughts never thunk by me, or never in just these words.

But there’s more too on Toby’s Post-­it annotation: “It’s a sweet letter. I was touched by it.” In the spirit of confession may I disclose that I too am touched by my jejune gospel of a literary calling? My correspondence with my brother launched gaudy little vessels of language; my ­sentences didn’t go forth carrying cargo, but in a hope of netting something out there on the vasty deeps. At the end I signed off: “I’m sorry I have no news; I have little to talk of other than my work. That is everything.”

It’s simple enough to poke fun at the patchwork boy I was, the ill-­matched concoction of attitudes and characteristics I aspired to be. I dressed in motley: three-­piece blue pinstripe with gravy stains on the vest (a touch of Edmund Wilson in the waistcoat?), suspenders, wire-­rimmed glasses to add even more years to my solemn face pallid from bad diet and irregular habits. (My God—­I’d already had my first gout attack.) My Cambridge college tie beneath my Cambridge gown offset bohemian footwear, Army-­surplus boots. The Greeks, Jacobeans, Metaphysicals shared my bookshelves with modern poets, William Burroughs, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet and Europe on Five Dollars a Day. Parked in front of my digs stood a cherry-­red 750-­cc Royal Enfield Constellation, with full racing fairing, hell of a bike. George Steiner, my Churchill College tutor, my reason for being at Cambridge, was satisfied by the (literary) books, but sore about the motorcycle. Let’s call the ragout of my conflicting circumstances a mess.

But for all the hotchpotch of my circumstances and styles, for all the egregious posturing and borrowed sentiment and faked-­up lingo of my lugubrious letter to my brother, there was also something there I won’t disavow. In those overwrought homilies about the long littleness of life and eternal uplift of Art was a felt passion, a longing for something that mattered, might stay, be firm. To learn something, to master something, anything, is as sweet as first love. In fact, it may be first, preceding memory, the blissed-­out grin that seems urged by the nervous system to accompany a baby’s first solo steps, or a kid’s first bicycle ride, or anyone’s first unmonitored, unassigned, discretionary experience of reading. Don’t you remember the first thing you read? Mine was Donald Duck, and I was sitting in the bay window of a boardinghouse in Saybrook, Connecticut, where a drunk husband and his drunk wife hectored my drunk father about a gambling debt unpaid for fifteen years, and the awful noise went through me like silence through space, because I was elsewhere, living otherwise. And like a great whistler, who can entertain himself at will, or a sixteen-­year-­old with license, car and gasoline, I had the keys to the cell. To read was to escape, at will, solitary confinement.

Later I was forever pressing books on friends (“Have you read this? You must read that!”); now I pitched woo saying poems by heart. I favored, for their periodic drive and lonely outcasts caught in implied sensual contact, the closing lines of Paradise Lost:

The world was all before them, where to choose

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:

They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow

Through Eden took their solitary way.

I knew then that a life lived reading and writing could be a life well lived, in good company. That may have been all I knew, but I would not unknow it now.

I was an eager student back then, avid to please, twenty-­six going on sixty. The teachers whose good reports I cherished were cultural and literary critics—­R. P. Blackmur, George Steiner, F. R. Leavis—­for whom it seemed to me (if not to them) that literature of imagination was a secondary artifact, the rough ore from which the precious alloy of criticism might be fabricated. To me, then, the self-­consciously impenetrable essays in Scrutiny, Encounter, Partisan Review and Kenyon Review were primary texts, and to read them was to belong to an exclusive guild whose members shared a dense jargon, a chastening insistence on commitment to text, a call to arms in some arcane combat in which a solemn band of initiates guarded the True Faith’s gates against a vulgar gang of middlebrow, mid-­cult vandals.

I wished to stand stringent sentry among the few initiates. Why? I was a sucker for pulpit oratory (as long as it came delivered from a secular pulpit—­say, a lectern), and I was a sucker for whatever was inside the place I was outside. Also, I was skeptical of all faiths, save bookishness; I was bone-­idle, except around books. Around books I worked like a Turk, reading with a pencil in my hand, reading three or four things at a clip. I had read headlong and helter-­skelter since I’d plowed as a kid through Albert Payson Terhune simultaneously with...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804170096
ISBN 13 
9780804170093
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
EDITIONS GALLIMARD
ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it

Via Verdi, 8.
Assago Milano
20090
Italien

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